QuickTip: Counting Text using everyItem()

Counting words and also paragraphs, stories, characters is something pretty easy to achieve, but very often done in wrong way. Most of the time, people are looping through stories, text frames, paragraphs and adding word count. That is OK, for short documents, with short stories, but as document length increases, script needs more and more time to loop through all stories, and get all words. People are forgetting about awesome method called everyItem! Method remained undocumented until InDesign CS3, but scripting experts such as Dave Saunders had already pointed out its forcefulness and already knew how to exploit it. It allows us to get all elements within collection. For more info about everyItem method be sure to check two awesome articles by Marc Autret: On ‘everyItem()’ – Part 1 and On ‘everyItem()’ – Part 2. So, let’s take a look how everyItem method can help us count stuff. 🙂